Remote listening and passive acoustic detection in a 3-D environment

Teleconferencing environments are a necessity in business, education and personal communication. They allow for the communication of information to remote locations without the need for travel and the necessary time and expense required for that travel. Visual information can be communicated using cameras and monitors. The advantage of visual communication is that an image can capture multiple objects and convey them, using a monitor, to a large group of people regardless of the receiver's location. This is not the case for audio. Currently, most experimental teleconferencing systems' audio is based on stereo recording and reproduction techniques. The problem with this solution is that it is only effective for one or two receivers. To accurately capture a sound environment consisting of multiple sources and to recreate that for a group of people is an unsolved problem. This work will focus on new methods of multiple source 3-D environment sound capture and applications using these captured environments.;Using spherical microphone arrays, it is now possible to capture a true 3-D environment A spherical harmonic transform on the array's surface allows us to determine the basis functions (spherical harmonics) for all spherical wave solutions (up to a fixed order). This spherical harmonic decomposition (SHD) allows us to not only look at the time and frequency characteristics of an audio signal but also the spatial characteristics of an audio signal. In this way, a spherical harmonic transform is analogous to a Fourier transform in that a Fourier transform transforms a signal into the frequency domain and a spherical harmonic transform transforms a signal into the spatial domain. The SHD also decouples the input signals from the microphone locations. Using the SHD of a soundfield, new algorithms are available for remote listening, acoustic detection, and signal enhancement The new algorithms presented in this paper show distinct advantages over previous detection and listening algorithms especially for multiple speech sources and room environments. The algorithms use high order (spherical harmonic) beamforming and power signal characteristics for source localization and signal enhancement These methods are applied to remote listening, surveillance, and teleconferencing.